Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 14.04.1 (Trusty Tahr) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 14.04.1 and its flavors. For details of the changes applied since 14.04.0, please see the 14.04.1 change summary. The release notes for 14.04 are available as well.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Ubuntu Kylin. All other flavours will be supported for 3 years.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or Ubuntu 13.10

Press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager" (without the quotes) into the command box.

Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '14.04 LTS' is available.

Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade on a server system:

Install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed.

Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade.

Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

Offline upgrade options via alternate CDs are no longer offered for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.

New features in 14.04 LTS

Updated Packages

As with every new release, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are being updated at a rapid pace. Many of these packages came from an automatic sync from Debian's unstable branch; others have been explicitly pulled in for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

For a list of all packages being accepted for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, please subscribe to trusty-changes.

Networking - Included Open vSwitch 2.0.1 support (including VXLAN), better bonding support, better bridge management and diagnosis and new buffer bloat avoidance measures. We also introduce better TCP connection management in the face of packet loss, plus TCP fastopen and improved attack tolerance. Intel wifi 6K/7K support was included as well as Infiniband stack updates to provide Mellanox RDMA and VXLAN support. Finally, we see the first stages of the switch to nftables, which should see incremental improvements to network security.

Scheduling - the default I/O scheduler was changed from CFQ to Deadline.

Thermal and Power Management - Power management and efficiency continues to be a focus and we saw the inclusion of the Intel RPL (Running AVerage Power Limit) support for enforcing and monitoring power limits on modern Intel processors. Additionally, we saw the introduction of the Intel PowerClamp driver for improved power efficiency. We also disabled intel_pstate by default as we witnessed poor behavior on some systems (1188647)

Virtualization - As well as major improvements to Xen and KVM (including ARM support for both), we also see VMware support, full support for KVM 2.0.0 (including QEMU KVM), version 1.2.2 of libvirt and the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. Alongside general performance improvements in the virtio subsystems, support for namespaces in containers was also introduced and we finally saw support for unprivileged containers.

Filesystems - general performance and latency improvements have been made across the board for filesystems such as Btrfs, XFS, and Ext4. Metadata checksumming and improved quota support for Btrfs, XFS, and Ext4 have been included as well as Ext2/3 support via the Ext4 driver.

Security - Improvements to AppArmor allow more fine-grained control over applications. See detailed AppArmor release notes below. The Integrity Measurement Architecture has also been enabled. Packaging updates for signed kernels were also performed as well as EFI boot support.

Hardware support - ARM multiplatform support has been added, enabling you to build a single ARM kernel image that can boot across multiple hardware platforms. Additionally, the ARM64 and Power architectures are now fully supported. X32 ABI support (64-bit mode with 32-bit pointers) was also introduced. We also saw copious amounts of HW enablement such as support for Intel Haswell processors, Lynx Point chipsets, Avoton SoC support, i915 driver support for Broadwell graphics, AMD Kabini and Kaveri APU enablement, AMD Sea Islands GPU enablement, and ARM64 APM X-Gene platform support. Also, Ubuntu kernel flavors and architectures were cleaned up with the removal of the i386 generic-pae flavor and eliminating armel architecture support.

Python 3.4

We eventually intend to ship only Python 3 with the Ubuntu desktop image, not Python 2. The Ubuntu 14.04 LTS image continues this process, although we will not be able to convert everything to Python 3 for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

AppArmor

AppArmor has a number of new features in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS LTS. Notably:

Support for fine-grained mediation of signal(7)

Support for fine-grained mediation of ptrace(2)

Improved DBus mediation

New abstractions for applications running under Unity

Several new tunables supporting XDG user directories, dovecot and more

Various policy updates in support of new features and bug fixes

A new @{profile_name} variable to reference the current profile name within policy

New Python and Python3 AppArmor libraries (python-apparmor and python3-apparmor)

AppArmor policy has been adjusted for packages that ship it to work with these changes, but local policy may need to be adjusted, especially for signal and ptrace rules. See man 5 apparmor.d for details.

Oxide

Oxide is a webview based on Chromium to deliver web content. Oxide allows us to better support 3rd party developers and applications within the Ubuntu archive by providing a fast, secure and up to date webengine library for the duration of the LTS. While other web content libraries such as those based on webkit are available, their maintenance will be limited to new upstream minor version releases only, and application developers are encouraged to use Oxide instead.

Xorg

The Xorg display server and drivers have been updated to the 15.0.1 release and mesa has been updated to 10.1.

Ubuntu Server

OpenStack 2014.1

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the OpenStack 2014.1 (Icehouse) release of the following projects in Ubuntu main:

OpenStack Compute - Nova

OpenStack Identity - Keystone

OpenStack Imaging - Glance

OpenStack Block Storage - Cinder

OpenStack Networking - Neutron

OpenStack Object Storage - Swift

OpenStack Telemetry - Ceilometer

OpenStack Orchestration - Heat

OpenStack Dashboard - Horizon

The OpenStack Charms for deploying OpenStack using Juju have been updated to support deployment of Icehouse - see the charm release notes for full details.

WARNING: Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment.

Users of OpenStack 2012.1 (Essex) on Ubuntu 12.04 should note that several components have changed/been superseded over the last two years:

Nova Volume has been replaced by Cinder.

Neutron has been introduced alongside Nova Network (deprecated but not removed yet).

The configuration file format has changed from a flags based format to a section based ini style format - configuration files should be reviewed and updated accordingly.

Existing OpenStack installations must be step upgraded through interim OpenStack releases (Folsom, Grizzly and Havana) using the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04. The Ubuntu Cloud Archive also provides the Icehouse release for 12.04; Users may prefer to upgrade to this release on 12.04 prior to upgrading the base Ubuntu operating system to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Please refer to the upstream release notes for full details of upgrading between OpenStack releases and the features introduced in each release.

Puppet 3

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Puppet 3. This is a major version upgrade from previous Ubuntu LTS releases and includes many changes which are not compatible with Puppet 2.7.x.

Xen 4.4

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Xen 4.4. This is a significant upgrade from the previous release. Of particular note the xen hypervisor no longer supports 32bit only CPUs on the x86 architecture; 32bit Dom 0 running on the 64bit hypervisor is still supported. The hypervisor will automatically be upgraded to the 64bit version (the Dom 0 does not need to change). Ensure your host is 64bit capable _before_ upgrading.

Also the XM (xend) management stack has been deprecated since Xen 4.1 and will be removed in the next version of Xen (4.5). Therefore we urge all users to start using the new xl toolstack. For that reason the default toolstack setting (/etc/default/xen) is changed to xl.

The format of normal configuration files is mostly identical, only usage of Python inside the config file is no longer supported. Also managed domains, which were managed by xend and stored in a different (sxpr) format will need to be migrated. When upgrading to Xen-4.4 an automatic migration of xend managed domains into xen and libvirt config files is attempted. However, due to many dependencies, this is failing more often than not. So when upgrade has been done and the host is running the new Xen hypervisor, the migration into xen config files can be started by calling "sudo /usr/lib/xen-4.4/bin/xen-migrate-xend-managed-domains". The resulting config files are written into /etc/xen and should be reviewed before usage.

Likewise, when libvirt is used to manage machines, the xend managed domains can be migrated into libvirt xml definitions by calling "sudo libvirt-migrate-xend-managed-domains". The resulting definitions should also get reviewed before usage (either virt-manager, virsh or looking in /etc/libvirt/libxl).

Once the new VM configs are working, it is recommended to remove the old ones (/var/lib/xend/domains/). This is not done automatically for safety reasons.

Ceph 0.79

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Ceph 0.79; Ceph will be upgraded to the Firefly stable release via a stable release update when 0.80 is released upstream. This release of Ceph includes efficient erasure coding of data for cold storage and tiered pooling. Please refer to the upstream release notes for full details on upgrading.

Qemu 2.0.0

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Qemu 2.0.0. Due to incompatibilities in the emulated hardware, live migration of pc-1.0 KVM virtual machines created on 12.04 is limited. To migrate such a VM, you must install the kvm-ipxe-legacy package, and use the "-M pc-1.0-precise" qemu option. If using libvirtd, you must set the 'allow_incoming_qemukvm = 1" option in /etc/qemu/qemu.conf. Such VMs cannot be migrated to releases later than 14.04 without first converting them to a newer machine type.

User emulation of arm64 binaries is now supported, and support for armhf and arm64 kvm-accelerated virtual machines is now available.

From 12.04 to 14.04, the default vmware vga memory size for machine type pc-1.0 has been reduced. If you are using a desktop image and being placed in low graphics mode, then switching to a new machine type, for instance pc-1.2 pc-i440fx-1.7, should solve the problem.

Open vSwitch 2.0.1

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Open vSwitch 2.0.1. See the upstream release notes for details of all features included in this release. Note that the openvswitch-datapath-dkms package is not compatible with the Linux 3.13 kernel shipped as default in 14.04 LTS; The native Open vSwitch module in the 3.13 kernel provides all the features of the dkms module apart from support for experimental LISP tunnelling and should be used instead.

Libvirt 1.2.2

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Libvirt 1.2.2 with full support for ceph and Xen 4.4

Juju 1.18.1

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the latest stable release of Juju, the service orchestration tool for Ubuntu. See the upstream release notes for full details of all new features and improvements in this release. Existing 1.16.6 juju environments can be upgraded to 1.18.1 by running:

juju upgrade-juju

strongSwan

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS now includes official support for strongSwan IPSec. strongSwan is a feature rich, modern IPSec solution. ipsec-tools, the supported IPSec solution in prior releases of Ubuntu, now receives community support and users are encouraged to migrate to strongSwan to maintain official support. For more information, please see this page.

MySQL

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS continues to provide official support for MySQL 5.5. Three other community supported alternatives of MySQL are also included:

Note that upgrading to MySQL 5.6 is an automatic one way process; it is possible to downgrade manually - see the upstream documentation on details of how to perform this process.

Apache 2.4

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Apache 2.4; this is a major version upgrade from Apache 2.2 in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and users should take care to read the upgrade notes included in the packaging and the upstream upgrading documentation.

PHP 5.5

PHP has been updated to 5.5, which is a major upgrade from 5.3 as available in the previous LTS. Upstream introduced some incompabilities in this update, and recommend testing before upgrading production environments. For more details, see the PHP migration guide.

Due to licensing problems, Debian dropped the PHP-supplied json module in Debian bug 692613, replacing it with a compatible json module instead. Ubuntu is aligned with Debian by default, and thus has picked up this change in 14.04 LTS, first in 13.10. The upgrade process will automatically pull in the new module. There have been claims of some edge case incompabilities in bug 1287726; testing is advised.

Ubuntu Touch

As part of the wider Ubuntu 14.04 release efforts the Ubuntu Touch team is proud to make the latest and greatest touch experience available to our enthusiast users and developers.

While this Ubuntu Touch release is still not a supported release, we feel it is important to hand out a relatively "stable" build for wider testing and feedback while we are continuing with high velocity towards our going-to-market milestone late this summer. Also, while not product quality yet, this image is a big step forward feature-wise compared to our initial release done in October 2013, so we hope you will enjoy using this on your phone and tablet.

Devices

For this milestone we added tablets to the mix of devices we offer builds for. The set of devices with builds available is:

Nexus 4 Phone (mako)

Nexus 7 (2013) Tablet (flo)

Nexus 10 Tablet (manta)

Unfortunately, we had to drop support for some platforms that previously had maintained builds to allow our engineering team to stay focussed on a small set of mobile hardware that are close to what we will have to support when going to market later this year. The following devices we stopped producing builds for:

Galaxy Nexus Phone (maguro)

Nexus 7 (2012) Tablet (grouper)

How to install or update

Our 14.04 release images are now available for consumption through our “stable” touch channel. Instructions on how to install Ubuntu Touch on those devices are available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install. You can also proceed with a system update on the officially-supported devices running the latest stable image.

What’s new?

Tablet and Phone form factors supported

This version features the tablet form-factor with the introduction of the side-stage when the screen size gives enough room to display it. You are able to set a phone-factor application into that side-stage and switch between the main and side stages. Multiple core applications as well have been extended to support and be responsive for various form factors and screen sizes in addition to getting a ton of new features and bug fixes.

A new Scope and Homescreen experience

The home screen and scope experience has seen a complete overhaul, delivering an even better and more stunning experience than before. Users can now enable and disable scopes to get more control about what is searched and delivering more accurate answers and will surely see the attention to detail that our design and engineering team has put into bringing these main UI experiences to where we are now. Give it a try!

Webapp story gets upgraded through oxide engine

The Web applications story just got boosted through integration of the oxide engine, a new web container featuring the V8 javascript engine and chromium rendering. With this we are now delivering an even faster web experience than before. Note that our browser is also using the same technology for a reliable and relaxing daily browsing experience.

Plumbing layer comes with all the latest from Ubuntu and Android 4.4 and Qt 5.2

On top of the usual freshness of the core stack that comes with an Ubuntu release, we upgraded our UI toolkit to Qt 5.2, featuring the new v4 javascript engine, and also uplevelled our enablement stack to Android 4.4 to better support latest android devices.

Developers get more features and convenience

On the developer side, a new layout framework and new facilities like tabulation title enhancement inherited by the new SDK release are available in our 14.04 framework. Also, developers can now use an emulator on their Ubuntu Desktop to do app and core system development.

And more ...

On top of the highlighted items above, there are many user noticeable improvements. Here is a short list:

support for multiple sim cards and simultaneous calls

render optimizations through MIR and Qt

working app lifecycle support so you never run out of memory

geolocation support

initial alarm system

calendar and contact sync

user notifications for system events such as available system images

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Just go ahead and experience it yourself. We are looking forward to your feedback and bugs!

Notes/Issues we are tracking

Here a list of issues we would like to point out for users that want to try installing or upgrading from Ubuntu 13.10:

System upgrade dialog displays 13.10 while you are installing 14.04. However, you will be as expected on a 14.04-based Ubuntu Touch version after the upgrade. (1308980)

After upgrading your 13.10 install to 14.04 your language setting will be forgotten; to workaround just go to the settings dialog after the upgrade and change it back to your preferred choice (1308888)

After upgrading your 13.10 Ubuntu touch phone to 14.04 your crash reporting/diagnosis setting will be forgotten; to workaround just go to the settings dialog after the upgrade and change it back to your preferred choice (1308917)

Music and events like alarms won't be triggered if the device is sleeping for too long (1292306)

New scopes cause some slowdown in UI responsiveness; while we fixed a good part of it in days before release, there is still a noticeable performance impact (1297197)

Known issues

As is to be expected, at this stage of the release process, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 14.04. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Boot, installation and post-install

Automatic install is broken on drives that contain partitions that either do not have an operating system installed (eg. a user data partition like /home on Linux or D: on Windows), or partitions that have Windows 8 installed. Selecting automatic install (or upgrade) on these systems will result in the whole drive being wiped and all existing data will be lost. There are also problems dealing with systems with multiple drives. This bug is present in released media of 14.04 and 14.04.1. If you have a drive with any pre-existing partitions, or multiple drives, then you should use manual partitioning. Ensure you have backups. (1265192)

The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the "Try Ubuntu without installing" boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)

When using installer to upgrade or reinstall an existing installation with encrypted swap, the installer may fail to reuse the partition. A warning will be shown, however the installation can be completed. The installed system will not have swap activated and users are advised to recreate swap on their systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (1066342)

Installs on very small memory systems may fail to start or exit without completing with no error. It is recommended that swap be created before install for such systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (1172161)

In rare circumstances the 'Next' button on the installer 'Install Type' screen is non-functional. This is intermittent and may be resolved by hitting 'Back' and retrying. (1172572)

On some systems, after installation, pressing 'Enter' doesn't reboot the system and a hard reset is required (1297851)

Live session starts with keyboard set to English US and time zone as UTC even if non-english languages are selected (1297234)

Selecting the Myanmar language at the language selection screen in the installer results in a crash (1303516)

In OEM mode, language packs are not installed when the end user selects a non-english language and there is no notification (1307983) To install additional languages, open "System Settings -> Language Support", the language support tool will the propose to install missing language packs.

Upgrade

Automatic upgrade on drives containing user data partitions, including from other operating systems, and all Windows 8 systems, will result in the whole drive being wiped and all existing data will be lost. This bug is present in released media of 14.04 and 14.04.1. If you have a drive with any pre-existing partitions, or multiple drives, then you should use manual partitioning. Ensure you have backups. (1265192)

When the system is upgraded from a previous release via the installer, the user has to re-enter their credentials. If the user's home directory is encrypted and the password differs from the password on the pre-upgrade system, the upgrade succeeds but the user cannot login (1308530)

Configuration of the package tex-common fails when 12.04 LTS is upgraded to 14.04 LTS (1304972)

Configuration of flightgear fails during upgrade from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS (1308338)

Power Management

On some systems, when opening lid, there is a kerneloops with a suspend/resume failure message seen. (1054732)

Desktop

SSH and GPG keys configured in the Password and Keys (seahorse) interface (those using the gnome-keyring agents) sometimes fail to be used. (1271591)

Migration

Graphics and Display

Networking

In order to improve compatibility with other local nameserver packages, NetworkManager now assigns IP address 127.0.1.1 to the local nameserver process that it controls instead of 127.0.0.1. If the system's /etc/resolv.conf is absent or is a static file instead of the symbolic link to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf installed by default then this static file will have to be updated by the administrator in order to continue using the NetworkManager-controlled nameserver.

AppArmor

The major tools in apparmor-utils AppArmor 2.8.95 have been rewritten to improve maintainability. While this allows us to better support them and add fixes going forward, currently the aa-genprof and aa-logprof CLI tools contain several bugs (1294797, 1296218) that affect their utility. These bugs should be fixed before release or in an SRU. It is recommended that people develop policy manually at this time.

Kernel

1292467 - Some laptops (particularly netbook class) with older graphics can experience poor graphical performance when starting with a high resolution external monitor attached. The reason for this is that some graphics cards (like the Intel 945GSE) cannot support accelerated 3D graphics when the combined width of both screens exceeds a certain threshold (typically 2048 pixels). See the bug for appropriate workarounds.

For a listing of more known issues, please refer to the Trusty Tahr bug tracker in Launchpad.

Official flavours

The release notes for the official flavours can be found at the following links: